Internet Censorship and Economic Impacts: A Case Study of Internet Outages in India Completed Research

The objective of this research paper is to provide a methodology for measuring the financial impacts of Internet outages. The financial impacts are measured against a Nation's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for several states in India to project the aftermath of Internet outage episodes. In addition historical trends are analyzed to help derive predictive logic for Internet outages in order to forecast Internet shutdown incidents based on antecedent events. Results demonstrate the proposed method for determining economic loss highlights several factors and may at times be influenced by the frequency of events compared to overall size of GDP. In addition, historical trend analysis of Internet outages suggests that a predictive model to forecast future outages can help reveal underlying policies toward Internet censorship.